Deceased September 6, 2018
View alumni profile (log in required)
Read obituary
In Memory
On Sept. 6 we lost Lanric “Ric” Hyland, who died in his sleep in Kapa’au, Hawaii. Ric was undoubtedly one of our older, most colorful and shorter-tenured classmates. He knew his life was fragile and even provided an anticipatory obituary to Jesse Brill ’64 prior to our 50th reunion.
He was the son of 1924 Olympic rugby gold medalist and Stanford All-American halfback, Richard “Tricky Dick” Hyland, and Louise “Lulu” Hyland, also a Stanford graduate. His stepfather, Al Weingand, was co-owner with Lulu of San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito, Calif.
Ric attended high schools in Hawaii (Punahou and Iolani) and California and matriculated into Amherst without a high school diploma. He attended Amherst for less than one year. Later he attended McGeorge law school in Sacramento before earning a master’s in human services administration from Antioch University and a master of arts in criminal justice from the State University of New York at Albany.
He was corrections consultant for the 1974 and 1976 legislative sessions, chair of the Oahu Chapter of the Hawaii Corrections Association and a director of the Hawaii Council on Crime and Delinquency while employed as a Youth Corrections Officer at Koolau and as a third-year clinical instructor at the University of Hawaii School of Law. He also worked at law enforcement jobs in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maryland, California and Washington, D.C.
In 1964, he used a gun in a holdup of his stepfather’s business, was convicted and sent to Soledad prison (“a prank,” he later said; he was pardoned in 2016). He is alleged to have dropped acid with Timothy Leary and have been in Eldridge Cleaver’s inner circle in prison. In his later years, Ric was an ardent ethics advocate who pushed for housing rights and government accountability in his community.
Vince Simmon ’64, with input from ’64 classmates Jesse Brill, Carl Levine, Gene Palumbo, Ray Battocchi, Rip Sparks, David Stringer, Terry Segal and Phil Allen